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Category: technology

Hacked!

Hacked!

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I left my desk for a cup of tea. When I came back 10 minutes later I had 30 or more returns from an email I didn’t send.

I’m not the most computer-savvy person in the world, but it didn’t take long to figure out what had happened. Someone (some people? something?) had hacked into my email account and sent everyone in my address book a link to some crazy product, a bunch of German words — or in some cases just my email signature, which includes a link to this blog.

It was inconvenient and embarrassing and took time to resolve. But strange to say it had an unexpected silver lining. It reconnected me with folks I hadn’t been in touch with in years. 

So what was triggered by the anonymity of the modern world became a powerful connector to real human beings.

Yes, I was hacked. But then I was healed.

Appreciation

Appreciation

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Sometimes when the wireless network is acting up and a website takes a long time to load, I remind myself how miraculous it all is. Here’s a technology that lets me read words someone is typing thousands of miles away. Here’s a technology that lets me do my work at home. Here’s a technology that lets me see pictures snapped minutes earlier on another continent.

Usually this little pep talk doesn’t work too well because I’m already miffed at the slow speed or the unreliability or whatever it is. I don’t understand the technology but have come to rely on it. And I realize, with dismay, that a moment of aggravation is not the best time to recapture the awe. Better to wait until things are smoother, till the website is up and running again.

But guess what? When the website is up and running I’m back to being oblivious, to taking at face value that which may as well be angels dancing on the head of a pin. It’s hard to appreciate things when they’re going well. Much better (but supremely difficult) to appreciate them when they don’t work at all.

Technical Difficulties

Technical Difficulties

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I wonder if anyone has done a study of the time spent trying to learn, operate and repair the electronic items in our possession. I wonder this because in the time I’ve spent trying to download a book on my much-neglected Kindle, I could have driven to the store and bought the book. (If I could find a bookstore and if the bookstore carried this book.)

The culprit: a new wireless network in our house, which means Netflix streams intermittently now, if at all, and the e-reader that worked with the old network and password is balking at the new one.

At these moments I inevitably anthropomorphize the gizmo, tell myself that it’s a creature of habit, doesn’t like the vibes given off by the new network, is a bit set in its ways. (Speaking of set in its ways, has it ever considered what it took for me to come around to reading on it?)

But no, apparently it hasn’t. And now the book I was planning to start for book group tonight is still up there in the ether and I’m reading something else entirely.

Everything is fast and easy these days. Until it isn’t.

(Ready to read — if only I could download the novel!)

Pink Smoke and Purple Clouds

Pink Smoke and Purple Clouds

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A funny thing happened on the way to work today. Same thing yesterday and the day before. I blame it on my phone, which is also my camera.

No longer do I stride quickly from Metro to office, car to train. Now I stop, look, snap. 

What would before have been preserved only in my mind is suddenly ripe for the taking. A wisp of smoke tinged pink by the rising sun. A bank of clouds moving in from the west.

Pictures are everywhere. Now I have a chance to take them.

I may never be on time again.

Night Sky

Night Sky

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I try to keep luddite posts to a minimum, but the new phone is making this difficult. To begin with, I’m intimidated by the thing. When I do slide it out of its special pocket in my purse, I hold it like a Ming dynasty vase. This is making it difficult to familiarize myself with its amazing features.

My children are horrified that I continue to use it like a 2005 flip phone: “Have you tried the GPS yet?” … “Have you bought any apps?” … “You don’t have any contacts, Mom.”

Well, that’s not entirely true. For some reason I have the email address of a high school counselor from 2009 but no numbers for people I actually need to reach.

And then there’s the way that the phone completes my words and sentences. I’m a writer; I’d rather do this myself.

But there is hope. Last night a satisfied user I met at a party told me what made him buy his iPhone — an app called Night Sky. “The phone knows where you are and it shows you all the constellations and their names,” he said.

Then he whipped out his iPhone — and the roof flew away and the people, too. And it reminded me of once when Tom and I were driving in Wyoming late at night and stopped to put oil in the car and looked up, almost accidentally, and could not believe our eyes.

A phone that brings the heavens into view. I’ll buy that.

R.I.P.

R.I.P.

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When I bought it, all three girls were living at home, one still in braces. When I bought it, the first iPhone had not yet been released.

Life was simpler then. An email was an email, a text a text. There was no cloud, or at least none accessible by a hand-held device.

I was proud of my flip phone. I could talk on it, text with it and even take photos with it (an innovation my earlier phone had lacked). I kept it in a case, for which the girls teased me mercilessly. They also teased me about my text messages, which I would laboriously type out letter for letter, including “Love, Mom” at the end.

For the last year and a half people could barely hear me when I called them. I stubbornly refused to replace the phone, though (it still texts! I only charge it once a week!), because I didn’t want to become a frantic email-checker (texter, tweeter?) who plays Solitaire on Metro instead of reading books.

So the iPhone has stayed in a box for 10 days, taunting me with its clever packaging, its superior camera (what I’m looking forward to most), its elegance, its functional beauty.  Until last night, when I gave in, kissed my flip phone goodbye and entered the 21st century.

But not before snapping a picture of my old phone and making it the wallpaper of my new one. A seamless transition. Kind of like the cloud.

Pushing Send

Pushing Send

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No longer the search for the envelope, the stamps, to say nothing of the white-out and carbon paper that preceded them. No longer the rush to the post office to make the last pick-up of the evening.

Now, instead, it’s the multiple save, the last-minute printer malfunction, the inexplicable garbling of text or omission of “o’s” in the preview document.

Now, at the last possible minute of the second-to-last possible day, it’s wondering whether the document should have been saved as a PDF after all.

But finally, after the problems are solved, the tempers calmed, the signatures checked and the credit card number encoded, it’s time to push “Send.”

Miracle of miracles, the Common App is on its way.

New Look

New Look

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Today I met Blogger’s “new look.” This is disconcerting for a creature of timid technological habits. I have my tiny little comfort zone. Ask me to move beyond it and I flail about like a new swimmer in the deep end.

Still, I recognize that we either move ahead or fall behind. Treading water only works for a while.

So I plunge in, click on the tutorial and somehow, in the course of figuring out how to write this morning’s post, turn on my iTunes account and a song called “To the Morning” by Dan Fogelberg.  I don’t know how I did this. It reveals my technological ignorance in all its glory. But it was a strangely satisfying choice.

“There’s really no way to say no to the morning,” is the song’s key lyric.

There’s no way to say no to the future, either.

Untethered

Untethered

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The other night, in a fit of hedonism, I watched the movie “Crazy Heart” on my laptop while lying outside in the hammock. It was the ultimate luxury: two hours of downtime outside, watching a movie, slightly swaying under the trees. And what made it possible? Wireless communication.

I realize that many of my posts rail against technology. Here’s one that does not. A post in praise of cordless phones, laptop computers, inventions that untether us. I remember how I would contort myself to talk in private on a corded phone: squeezing into closets, stepping into darkened rooms, buying extra long phone cords that twisted and tangled. Now I take a phone with me wherever I go.

It’s interesting, though, that the privacy I searched for in the old days has not exactly been served in the wireless era. Are we truly untethered, or are we bound by much longer and more insidious cords?

Back on Track?

Back on Track?

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The first of what will probably be several (I hope not too many) postings on Things I Notice Upon My Return:
I’m back on the Orange Line. In a way, it’s like I’ve never left. In another, it’s like I’ve never been on it before. I see more texting, more phoning, more fiddling with buttons. The Swedes were the most plugged-in Europeans I saw; the Viennese scarcely seemed plugged-in at all. But we Americans are earnest about our technology. We stare and scowl at tiny screens. We tap away vigorously. Our thumbs glide across touch-pads. We seldom look at the world around us.